Personal Narrative Of Travels To The Equinoctial Regions Of America During The Years 1799-1804 - Volume 2 - By Alexander Von Humboldt And Aime Bonpland.
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In The Cold Regions
Of The Kingdom Of Quito, The Natives Of Tigua Eat Habitually From
Choice, And Without Any Injurious Consequences, A Very Fine Clay,
Mixed With Quartzose Sand.
This clay, suspended in water, renders it
milky.
We find in their huts large vessels filled with this water,
which serves as a beverage, and which the Indians call agua or leche
de llanka.* (* Water or milk of clay. Llanka is a word of the general
language of the Incas, signifying fine clay.)
When we reflect on these facts, we perceive that the appetite for
clayey, magnesian, and calcareous earth is most common among the
people of the torrid zone; that it is not always a cause of disease;
and that some tribes eat earth from choice, whilst others (as the
Ottomacs in America, and the inhabitants of New Caledonia in the
Pacific) eat it from want and to appease hunger. A great number of
physiological phenomena prove that a temporary cessation of hunger may
be produced though the substances that are submitted to the organs of
digestion may not be, properly speaking, nutritive. The earth of the
Ottomacs, composed of alumine and silex, furnishes probably nothing,
or almost nothing, to the composition of the organs of man. These
organs contain lime and magnesia in the bones, in the lymph of the
thoracic duct, in the colouring matter of the blood, and in white
hairs; they afford very small quantities of silex in black hair; and,
according to Vauquelin, but a few atoms of alumine in the bones,
though this is contained abundantly in the greater part of those
vegetable substances which form part of our nourishment.
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